


Like Lazarus

by buttercups3



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Angst, Experimental Prose, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gratuitous John Donne Poetry, LJ 60 prompts in 60 days, M/M, Male Slash, Prompt: Lazarus, Uncle-Niece incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-01
Updated: 2013-09-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 07:41:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/950490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttercups3/pseuds/buttercups3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For those who have loved Miles, death might provide welcome relief if it weren't so difficult to stay dead. Brief, agonizing meditations on love, sex, and burial.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Lazarus

**Author's Note:**

> I shipped the be-Jeez out of Miles in this piece, so chances are your ship (should it include Miles) is in there. And yes, this is my Dadaist, prose-poetry entry of the week - I would include a toilet with an eye, smoking a cigarette, but that might be WEIRD. ;)

To be dead. To reawaken. It sounds melodramatic, hammy, but that’s how it feels to be inside Miles after all this time. It’s easy to ignore what’s missing: the walls of Miles’s rectum, for instance, or the cragged, life-weary face, because all Bass can see is white back paved with scars and pockmarks. The empty space within Bass’s dick is overfull with air, thudding against its own limitations. He begs himself for release that won’t come.

Because Bass isn’t Lazarus. The thing with Miles is dead and buried forever. Bass is just dreaming. If he wakes himself up, he can fist himself to climax. But then, even the outline of Miles will be gone.

* * *

Rachel has actually been dead – or so Miles claims. She can’t remember the part that came after Bass syringed her neck full of some piss-colored cocktail. She _can_ remember waking up in that faux-civilized room filled with books and maps and pencils for writing. Ruby-red wine when she wanted it. Tri-colored, balanced meals of which even her mother would have approved. And the incongruously courtly Bass who would one minute, reminisce about twirling Rachel at her wedding waltz and the next, send Strausser in with a hook to gouge out the tender flesh beneath her nails.

She’d like to have seen her corpse through Miles’s eyes and feel what he felt, knowing he could have prevented it. Scalding passion, giving way to boundless regret and self-loathing. She’d take pleasure in the depth of his hurt, because that’s what dead people are owed. Now she can’t know it, because all she can do is look into those black eyes – little masks – and try to fathom how someone who loves you could do and say the things he did and said to her. How during the affair after trembling and losing himself inside of her, he’d pulled out and turned away, cradling his elbows like a lost boy. When she’d touched him and inquired, he’d admitted, “Hell to love something this much and know it’s not yours.” Some _thing_ : her. So if he could say that – _feel_ that – how could he later intone with perfect coldness that he did not care at all?

In her next disappearing act Rachel will stay dead. Try that on, Miles.

* * *

Dad. Maggie. Danny. Nora. Say their names while the feeling lasts. Love – not the imagined kind you build up with flimsy memories like a house of cards that with one wrong puff flutters away. The _real_ kind, where you can feel their arms warming and compressing; hear the tinkle of their laughs; smell the river, the sage, the medicinal ointment, the gunpowder.* Their signature perfumes.

Despite her tears, Charlie is not the sentimental fool her uncle is. She knows exactly how long the dead stay with you and that they never resurrect once gone. Miles holds out hope that the people he loves will come back to him. And there’s something in that tragic, childlike quality that draws her to him at night, when he’s shivering not from cold but private anguish.

Miles has told Charlie things he’ll tell no one else when their fingers are sewn together and the soft hairs of his pelvis rub against hers with titillating friction. “Want this,” he’s whimpered, clearly despising himself for it. But she’s just pulled him in deeper to satisfy a longing her body invents only for him. Her uterus contracting in an ancient rhythm that doesn’t know uncle from any other man – just fulfillment, simple and bottomless.

What’s that John Donne poem she’d read among her dad’s collection of books? Orgasm is a kind of death. Ben hadn’t wanted her to read it – too dirty.**

We die and rise the same, and prove  
Mysterious by this love.

So in their mutual desperation, Charlie has watched her uncle’s dick rise just for her; she’s smoothed her cheek against its silk. She’s traced his lonely-looking ribs as they poke through weary muscles. She’s admired and loved every square centimeter of that magnificent and wretched man like he’s already dead.

* * *

At last, Miles is in his coffin, and though this is all a show – a plan to get them outside the gates of Philly – it feels so right he wants to laugh. Really belly laugh, like he’s done - well - never. It’s not even that it’s funny; it’s that he’s relieved.

When Nora lifts him out of his pine box and presses cold, wet lips against his, it is with genuine disappointment that he takes in the world outside. He never asked to live when everyone else died. He never asked to be a fucking Lazarus. But he keeps getting spared like he’s got an endless number of lives in reserve, and to do what?

He’s got no choice now with all these people relying upon him that he can’t help but feel. He may have caused their wounds, but now he’s got to be the maggot, gnawing at their rot until it’s gone. That’s the only way the wounds heal. Death would be so much easier.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> *A scent Dareyoutoread attached to Nora and will always be Nora for me.
> 
> **John Donne, “The Canonization.”


End file.
